The Botanist

The Botanist is a 2D fantasy RPG intended for release on multiple platforms, including web, Android and iOS. The game features an immersive universe with deep supporting mythology and lore; a relative rarity among mobile games.

Beta releases in early 2016.

The Botanist Blog

This blog will feature progress updates and lessons learned from the game's development. While there are many technical game dev blogs, we also intend to share our creative process and we hope you can learn from both our successes and mistakes.

Many games require only simple saving and loading functionality. Perhaps all you need to save about a player is what level they’re up to and their high score — in which case you don’t need an article like this.

The Botanist is all about huge maps and lots of environment — especially giant, sprawling forests with tons of trees. Unfortunately, stage loading performance has been terrible for my larger maps, so I decided to dive in and figure out the issue. As a reward, I received a 1,500x decrease in my stage loading time with PhaserJS. I’m excited about this, so I’d like to share the solution with you all.

Performance is important to The Botanist. I don’t love premature optimization,
but it’s important to understand the performance bottlenecks of the game on
various platforms and in various browsers from an early stage, lest they become
insurmountable issues later.

All RPGs need good dialogue to support a good story. Dialogue, of course, has a
few shapes. The player must be able to interact with NPCs, the NPCs should be
able to interact with each other, and there should be a healthy amount of
background chatter. This article describes how The Botanist’s player/NPC
interaction works.

I’ve been using PhaserJS for the development of The Botanist. Phaser has been generally great to work with, is rapid to develop on top of, and has excellent performance on desktop. Phaser is also a mobile-conscious framework, and I do often get 60FPS on my Nexus 5’s Chrome browser.

Other than the story itself, battle is the most important part of The Botanist.
Now that I’ve got basic maps and movement working, I decided to spend some time
on developing the core of the battle system. A game can be fun to play test
with just maps and battling, so building this system has a nice side effect of
making the rest of the development process even more fun!

This week’s effort was spent on basic battle mechanics (amongst many, many
other things). I learned how to use Phaser to kill things and figured out
targeting, attacking, and basic speech bubbles. This post concentrates on
attacking and killing sprites.

My first week of prototyping The Botanist has been productive and swift! I’ve
got basic maps rendering, character sprites walking around, basic input for
desktop and mobile, and a decent file structure and build system.

The Botanist is a 2D fantasy RPG intended for release on multiple platforms,
including web, Android and iOS. The game features an immersive universe with
deep supporting mythology and lore; a relative rarity among mobile games.

It’s too easy to get caught up in life and forget to be ambitious. For the last
several years, I’ve spent my holidays building small and quick side projects –
projects that are easily digestible, easily executable, not ambitious, and
primarily intended as practice. Happily and fortuitously, several of these have
been popular successes (and many have not), but I’d like to try a different
approach in 2015. I’d like to build something big and ambitious, work with my
friends, and have a long term goal to look forward to.